RC32 - Public Policy and Administration

The ECPR Standing Group 'Theoretical Perspectives in Policy Analysis' would like to draw your attention to the following publication, produced by the UK Political Studies Association's ‘Interpretive Political Science Specialist Group’:

Interpreting Governance, High Politics, and Public Policy (Nick Turnbull, ed.) May 2016, ISBN 9781138777286. Routledge: http://bit.ly/2022evN 

Knowing Governance
The Epistemic Construction of Political Order
Edited By Jan-Peter Voß and Richard Freeman

Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the design and making of its models and instruments. What kinds of knowledge do they require and reproduce? How are new understandings of governance produced in practice, by scientists and policy makers and by the publics with whom they engage? How does politics work through the production of ideas and information that both describe and prescribe how governing is done? This book outlines and explores a new approach to the study of governance at the intersection of governmentality studies, interpretive policy studies and science and technology studies. Each chapter presents an empirically-grounded case study of how particular accounts of governing are worked out, and how new realities of governance emerge in the course of making it knowable. Each introduces and applies a key concept from science and technology studies, setting out a variety of ways of making knowledge about governance and its constituent politics.

A forum in the latest issue of the journal Critical Policy Studies includes an article about the interpretive approach to policy, along with critiques from several members of an international network of scholars interested in critical and interpretive policy studies. This forum should be especially useful for teaching students about interpretive/critical methods, their distinctiveness from positivist approaches, and the relation between epistemology, theoretical perspective, and methodology/methods.

Through an arrangement with the publisher, these articles have been made available for free downloading at this link: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcps20/current .

Special isue on the experiences of developing countries of the transformation of public services through the adoption of e-government

Submission Due Date
10/31/2015

Guest Editors
Dr. Frank Louis Kwaku Ohemeng, University of Ottawa, Canada

This special issue attempts to fill the lacuna left by the lack of empirical studies on the adoption and implementation of e-government in developing countries. It will thus draw on case studies to determine whether or not e-government is transforming, or has actually transformed, the relevant public sector institutions. The questions this special issue attempts to answer include: What is meant by the transformation of public services through e-government? Is there in fact any hard evidence delineating the transformation of public sector institutions through the adoption of e-government? If so, can such transformation be solely attributed to e-government and, if not, then what other factors may account for any transformation or lack thereof? What are the challenges and prospects for the adoption of e-government in public sector institutions in developing countries?

we are glad to announce that the first issue of EPA (European Policy Analysis) has been published. It is now free accessible on-line

The journal's editors Nils Bandelow (Brunswick), Peter Biegelbauer (Vienna), Fritz Sager (Bern) and Klaus Schubert (Muenster) present a journal focusing on Europe and thus addressing an international audience and invite everyone who is interested to be part of EPA – as a reader, guest editor or author. If you wish to submit an article, you're welcome to answer our call for papers, which you find by reading on. There is also a first call for special issue guest editors.

If you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact the editors.

Contact via email: epa@politikfeldanalyse.de

For additional information please visit ipsonet.org.

Yours sincerely, Nils Bandelow, Peter Biegelbauer, Fritz Sager, Klaus Schubert

The Journal of Social Science for Policy Implications is a refereed international journal that seeks to publish scholarly work in the social sciences defined in the classical sense, which is in the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences. The research that is published may take a theoretical or speculative model as well as statistical and mathematical. Contributions are welcome from all fields which have relevant and insightful comments to make about the social sciences. The journal bridges social science communities across disciplines and continents with a view to sharing information and debate with the widest possible audience. It has a particular interest in policy-relevant questions and interdisciplinary approaches. It serves as a forum for review, reflection and discussion informed by the results of recent and ongoing research.

Michael Howlett tells us that the Annual Review of Policy Design has just published its latest issue (December 2014 Vol 2 (1)) at http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/design, and invites you to review the Table of Contents (read on) and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.